Transcript Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about “What even is a sandwich, and how does meaning even work anyway?”

Gretchen: This episode totally blew our minds when we were researching the classic internet debate.

Lauren: But first, this episode was originally posted as our 9th bonus episode in November 2017.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, it was from our first year. We have been doing monthly bonus episodes since 2017 for people who support us at the Ling-thusiast level or above. The support of patrons is literally the way the show keeps running and helps us not have to think about running ads or exposing you to other things you don’t wanna listen to.

Lauren: We now have over 100 bonus episodes in the Patreon bonus feed for you to listen to right now and new ones that come out every month.

Gretchen: Our bonus episodes are often a little bit more playful and less likely to be used in a linguistics classroom, like our several swearing bonus episodes.

Lauren: Or the whole bonus episode on the linguistics of kissing.

Gretchen: But overall, we have as much fun with bonus episodes as our mains. We love them so much, we wanted to share one from the archive on the main feed.

Lauren: It also gives us a chance to catch a bit of a break between preparing new episodes.

Gretchen: This was something we did last year as well, and it really helps us during a busy period.

Lauren: Indeed, there’re multiple reasons to love this tradition that we’ve started. We’re gonna play the original episode. We are gonna skip the intro with updates from 2017.

Gretchen: Ooo, what was the hot news in 2017?

Lauren: We were heading towards full-length bonus episodes – a thing we have been doing for almost eight years now.

Gretchen: I had almost forgotten that these bonus episodes weren’t full length to start.

Lauren: We literally didn’t have the money to pay Claire to edit full-length bonuses for us a year into making the show.

Gretchen: That explains why this was only about 20 minutes of tape. We were also celebrating our first official anniversary month.

Lauren: Of course, because it was and is November, our anniversary. That’s so lovely.

Gretchen: We’re gonna revisit an episode from when we were a year into the show. We’ll listen along with you. And then I look forward to chatting with you at the end about other things that we’ve observed about this topic.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was all about linguistics landscapes and the way language is visible or not in the spaces around us.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to access this and many other bonus episodes including the original version of this episode with the announcements still intact.

[Music]

Lauren: We ran a poll with a very simple question: “Which of the following 20 items is a sandwich?”

Gretchen: If any!

Lauren: And people had opinions, I think it’s fair to say.

Gretchen: Yeah. This was, I think, maybe one of our more participated polls.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Definitely got the most comments because we didn’t manage to include a “none of the above” option because we ran up the max on the Patreon polls. We’re not gonna list all 20, because I assume you can see those, but I think of the most “sandwich” things, people were kind of most content to consider a hamburger a sandwich, maybe; bagel and cream cheese a sandwich; and an ice cream sandwich a sandwich. I mean. it’s got “sandwich” in the name! Like, it has to be a sandwich, right?

Lauren: Yeah. Things like burritos, pop-tarts, ravioli, apple pie didn’t really rate very highly.

Gretchen: Macarons, I don’t know – they seem very sandwich-y to me. They’ve got like, things on either side, and like a filling, and same with Oreos, like, they’re sandwich cookies. That’s their genre of cookie.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said ‘no’. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no’. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things…started to get a little murky. This isn’t just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more!

So wait…does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It’s okay, linguistics has a solution!

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about why deciding what’s in and what’s out of the definition of a word is so dang tricky, why people love to argue about it, and how prototype theory solves all the “is X a Y” arguments once and for all.

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 9: Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all. We’ve added an updated announcements section to the top and a few new things about prototypes and meaning to the end. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about fictional gestures with Eric Molinsky, host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction! We talk about the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther, and the three-finger Hunger Games salute, and how all three have crossed over with additional symbolism into the real world. We also talk about gestures that have crossed over in the other direction, from the real-world origins of the Vulcan salute in a Jewish blessing, the two-finger blessing in the Foundation tv series from classical Latin and Greek oratory via Christian traditions, as well as religious gesture in the Penric and Desdemona series, smiles and shrugs in A Memory Called Empire, and more.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Original episode on Patreon: ’Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all’
Lingthusiasm bonus episode ’Liveshow Q and eh’
Wikipedia entry for 'Prototype Theory’
'Memes in Digital Culture’ by Limor Shifman
Ann Leckie on Fangirl Happy Hour
Jaffa cake: cake or biscuit? (UK)
Crostini: bread or biscuit? (Aus)
Tomato: fruit or vegetable?
cup vs. bowl vs. vase
cup vs. mug
No Such Thing as a Fish (podcast)
Wikipedia entry for 'Harlem Shake’
Wikipedia entry for 'Numa Numa’
Wikipedia entry for ’Gangnam Style’
Lingthusiasm episode ’Translating the untranslatable’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Transcript Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Micro to macro - The levels of language’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about all the different layers of language structure. But first, thank you to everyone who shared so many excellent linguistics facts to celebrate our 100th episode anniversary!

Lauren: To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we’ve compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm.

Gretchen: If you want some suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, you can check out that link from our website.

Lauren: Even with 101 options, I’m sure there’re still a few we’ve missed. Feel free to tag us @Lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites.

Gretchen: Or if there’re any that you’re particularly excited to see on the list, we would love this to help be a bit of a hub for people to find other cool linguistics communication projects.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview with Julie Sedivy about our relationship with language and how it changes throughout our lives and the linguistics of what makes writing feel beautiful.

Gretchen: You can also read Julie’s new book called Linguaphile, which is, indeed, very beautifully written. It is about that relationship that we have with language throughout our lives.

Lauren: For this and over 90 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to the 101st episode of Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: It’s LING 101!

Lauren: Oh my gosh, that is a classic first year subject course code.

Gretchen: I feel like there’s this canonical introduction to linguistics course that almost every linguistics programme has in some form. It’s a classic textbook format. It’s a classic course style. It goes from this very micro-level of language to this macro-level of language where you’re starting with very small list units and zooming out into the whole area of discourse.

Lauren: Weirdly enough, I absolutely did this subject, but we didn’t have course codes like “LING 101,” but I did do an introduction to linguistics that was exactly like this.

Gretchen: Ours also was not called “LING 101.” It was called “LING 100.”

Lauren: Oh, no. That was the last episode. We missed it.

Gretchen: We missed it. Now we can’t do it ever. Then I was at another university where it was called “201.” I don’t really wanna wait for another 100 episodes for us to be able to do this. I think “101” is still classically in the culture – the idea of an intro linguistics course – even if there’re many course codes that are different from that.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is intentionally not in this structure.

Gretchen: It seems like it would be a bit of a shame if we had to start like, okay, our first year is like, only phonetics, and then we’re gonna do only phonology, and then when we get all the way to pragmatics, we’ve got to stop doing the podcast or something. We made a very conscious decision early on to mix it up a bit.

Lauren: I mean, especially with the level of detail wherein – imagine if we’re like, “We’re 100 episodes in. We’re now moving from individual phones up to phonology.” We could’ve been here for quite a while.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it’s more fun to mix it up. It also means that if we encounter a really good example or anecdote or paper – a new paper comes out – that we wanna talk about about a particular topic, there’s always more stuff that we can say about sounds. It’s not like, “Oh, well, we did sounds for the first three years, and then we never get to do sounds again.”

Lauren: Episode 101 is a great time to actually take ourselves through – 101 course-style – all these different layers of linguistic structure so you can see how a finite number of building blocks had this capacity to combine in so many novel ways.

Gretchen: I think of it as those – have you ever seen those videos where they start really, really zoomed in on a quark or an electron or a nucleus, and then they zoom out to the atom, and then to the cell, and then to the plant, and then to the backyard, and then to the map-view, and the Earth-view, and the Solar System, and the galaxy, and then you feel like, “Wow! We’re so far out!” and then you can zoom back in and back out. It’s very trippy and fun. We can do that with language.

Lauren: One of the great things about this is that those building blocks being able to combine in really versatile ways allows us to create sentences that have never been uttered before. Collecting these is something of a linguist’s hobby.

Gretchen: We have a few fun sentences that we can keep returning to and talk about them and all these different layers. But let’s debut our candidate sentences here.

Lauren: One: “Today, I learnt that there were smaller walrus ancestors, and I am extremely happy to report that the researcher writing about this did, indeed, refer to them as ‘smallrus’.”

Gretchen: Number Two: “Moons can have moons, and they are called ‘moonmoons’.”

Lauren: Three: “As the current record holder for the highest score in Donkey Kong, Hank Chien is legally fourth in line to be President of Taiwan.”

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Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspective often found in Linguistics 101 classes. We start with sounds and handshapes, moving onto accents and sound changes, fitting affixes into words, words into sentences, and sentences into discourse. We also talk about areas of linguistics that involve language at all these levels at once, including historical linguistics, child language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Plus: why we don’t follow this order for Lingthusiasm episodes or Crash Course Linguistics and how you can give yourself a DIY intro linguistics course.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

To celebrate Lingthusiasm now having more than 100 episodes, we have compiled a list of 101 places where you can get even more linguistics enthusiasm! This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @ lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, psycholinguist and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile! We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Transcript Episode 96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about metaphors. But first, this episode was originally posted as a bonus episode in August of 2019.

Lauren: Ever since March 2017, we’ve been doing bonus episodes alongside main episodes every month for people who support us at the Lingthusiast level and above on Patreon. They’re our way of thanking people who support us on Patreon. As a show that doesn’t have sponsors or advertising, it’s your direct support that keeps the show going.

Gretchen: The good news is that we’re not part of some network that can just decide we’re not allowed to make the show anymore. When we first started the bonus episodes, they were a bit shorter than the main episodes because we wanted to make sure that it’d be sustainable to keep up a regular production schedule.

Lauren: You’d think after doing this show for eight years we would’ve made Lingthusiasm a lean and efficient production. And yet, it turns out, we still take a lot of time to put these episodes together because we just keep having higher standards.

Gretchen: Yeah. We definitely do a lot more research now because some of the early topics we covered were stuff that we already had a whole bunch of background on, and so we didn’t need to do quite as much digging into other sources and asking other people – our many linguist friends and colleagues – for their suggestions and input, which we do a lot more of now.

Lauren: This is also true for the bonuses. They went from being these 10-to-20 minutes on things like the linguistics of swearing or what we mean by the word “sandwich,” and then they very quickly – like, within about 12 months – became very similar to main episodes both in length and in structure and the amount of research that we do.

Gretchen: We do sometimes do a bonus episode that is a deep dive into a single research article, like the time we discussed Bill Labov sneaking a rabbit into a primary school.

Lauren: Hm, yes, classic.

Gretchen: Or the time we talked about the very classic salad-salad paper, which is about, you know when you have egg salad and potato salad and then “salad-salad.”

Lauren: We also have bonuses where we’ve done things like attempt to create a computer-generated transcript of Lingthusiasm with Janelle Shane, or we’ve done Q&A episodes. We have at least 90 bonus episodes available to you right now, which make a really fun catalogue of listening alongside the main episodes.

Gretchen: They can be a bit of a blast from the past if you go back to some of the very early ones. If you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcast episodes on the back burner, and you don’t really need more listening material, but you’d just like to help us keep existing long into the future, we also really appreciate your support for whatever reason you wanna give it to us.

Lauren: We’re really proud of our bonus episodes, and we wanted to give them a bit more attention. We’ve taken this older bonus to share with you today.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

We’re taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don’t forget to hold on!

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It’s easy to think of literary comparisons like “my love is like a red, red rose” but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they’re visual - clear or murky or heavy or maybe fuzzy, but not as fluffy or feathery or metallic or polka-dotted, but other languages can use different metaphors. We also talk about the process of metaphor design, and how metaphors can help us understand - or misunderstand - abstract concepts like electricity or language learning.

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 30: Welcome aboard the metaphor train! We’ve added a few new things about metaphors and an updated announcements section to the top. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get Tom Scott’s Language Files team together on one call for the first and last time! We talk with host/writer Tom Scott, as well as researcher/writer Molly Ruhl and animator Will Marler, about their roles putting the videos togehter, Gretchen’s role in the brainstorming and fact-checking process, and what it’s like working on a big, multi-faceted project like the Language Files videos.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Original ‘Welcome aboard the metaphor train!’ episode on Patreon
Because Internet
Metaphor - etymology (Wikipedia)
Conceptual metaphors
Gentner, D. (1983). Flowing waters or teeming crowds: Mental models of electricity. In D. Gentner, & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental Models (pp. 99-129). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. (Gentner and Gentner 1983, 2014 reprint)
German 'wichtig’
Michael Erard’s metaphor for language learning
FrameWorks Institute
Malaphors
Cakewalk
After recording this episode we researched more about cakewalks, which turned out to have their origin in 19th Century dance events held by African Americans. This article by Nicole Emmanuel goes into more on the history of cakewalk.

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Transcript Episode 95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about our default assumptions for learning new words – whether as kids, in a classroom, or while travelling. But first, we have new merch.

Gretchen: We have three new designs for merch. First off, we have some t-shirts, stickers, and badges, buttons, pins, whatever you call them, that say, “Ask me about linguistics.” They look like one of those classic, red “Hello, my name is” stickers only with “linguistics” instead of you name for those times when you’re maybe at a conference or an event or going about your life, and you want people to know that they can skip the small talk with you and talk directly about linguistics with you.

Lauren: We also have t-shirts that say, “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have,” which is not untrue.

Gretchen: This is a classic kind of sentence in linguistics more commonly found as “More people have been to Russia than I have,” but that was less funny and self-referential on a t-shirt. These are called the “comparative illusion,” which is when the first time you read that sentence with the comparative in it – “More people have been to Russia than I have” – you’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. Wait. Hang on. What does that even mean?” That’s the illusion part. The illusion is that it makes sense. If you think about it longer, then it doesn’t make sense.

Lauren: It doesn’t make sense.

Gretchen: If you wear a shirt that says this – or a hat, or you carry around a mug or a sticker or a tote bag – that says these things with, of course, the word “shirt” swapped out for the relevant object – because we know how to do that – then people might do a double-take when they see it. You can confuse people, which sounds fun.

Lauren: This t-shirt is available in an old school typewriter-looking font. All of our shirt options are there on Redbubble with a range of different cuts and colours. We have relaxed-fitted classic t-shirts as well as hoodies, zip hoodies, and tank tops.

Gretchen: We have a secret third design, which we will be talking about later this episode – dun dun dun.

Lauren: Mm, suspense and mysteries.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is about the word “do” in English, and why it’s weird compared to basically every other language, and how this only started happening in the past few hundred years.

Lauren: To listen to this and many other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Plus, patrons got to find out about this new merch a few weeks ago. If you become a patron now, you’ll be the first to find out about future new merch and other behind-the-scenes updates. And you get to hang out on the Lingthusiasm Discord server to chat with other linguistics fans. Plus, of course, getting a whole bunch of bonus episodes and just helping us continue making the show for you.

[Music]

Lauren: I want you to imagine you’re visiting a place where you don’t speak the language. You’re standing in a field with one of your new friends. It’s a lovely day. You’re enjoying the scenery. And a rabbit scurries by. That person you’re standing with says, “Gavagai.” What do you think they are referring to?

Gretchen: I wanna say that they’re talking about the rabbit. This is a word that means “rabbit,” probably, in whatever that language is.

Lauren: Possibly.

Gretchen: But, in principle, it could mean a lot of other things as well. It could mean “scurrying” or “creature,” “animal,” or, as the philosopher V. W. O. Quine said, “Lo, un-detached rabbit parts,” which is just a very bizarre mental image.

Lauren: This is indeed a classic linguistic thought experiment from the philosopher V. W. O. Quine.

Gretchen: It’s also found in philosophy of language as well as linguistics. The philosophers sometimes also talk about this anecdote from a more philosophical perspective. The thing that’s exciting to me about it as a linguist is that it’s this pretty good approximation and distillation of the kind of challenge that you have when you’re trying to figure out some words in another language, and you don’t have someone or a book that can do some translation for you. You’re just like, “Well, here’s this word that’s been said in this context. What do I think it refers to?”

Lauren: I also appreciate how this one little thought experiment, interactional moment, set Quine on a philosophical train of thought that took up an entire book. Quine’s 1960 book Word and Object takes this thought experiment as its starting point to tease apart a lot of the issues around how we make and share meaning, especially across languages.

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95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetatched rabbit-part!”

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we’re learning new words, inspired by the famous “Gavagai” thought experiment from the philosopher of language WVO Quine. We talk about how children have a whole object assumption when learning language, and how linguists go about learning languages that are new to them through either translating standardized cross-linguistic wordlists known as Swadesh lists or staying monolingual and acting out concepts. We also talk about when our baseline assumptions are challenged, such as in categorizing kangaroos and wallabies by their hopping rather than their shape, and when useful folk categories, like “trees” and “fish” don’t line up with evolutionary taxonomies.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:
We have new Lingthusiasm merch!

Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetached rabbit-part!” Inspired by the famous Gavagai thought experiment, these items feature a running rabbit and the caption “lo, an undetached rabbit-part!” in a woodblock engraving crossed with vaporwave style in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black/white on shirts, scarves, and more!

“More people have been to Russia than I have” is a sentence that at first seems fine, but then gets weirder and weirder the more you read it. Inspired by these Escher sentences, we’ve made self-referential shirts saying “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have” (also available on tote bags, mugs, and hats), so you can wear them in old-time typewriter font and see who does a double take.

Finally, we’ve made a design that simply says “Ask me about linguistics” in a style that looks like a classic “Hello, my name is…” sticker, and you can put it on stickers and buttons and shirts and assorted other portable items for when you want to skip the small talk and go right to a topic you’re excited about.

Also, there are lots of other designs of Lingthusiasm merch, and we love to see your photos of it! Feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media so we can see it out in the world.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the word “do”! We talk about the various functions of “do” as illustrated by lyrics from ABBA and other pop songs, what makes the word “do” so unique in English compared to other languages, and the drama of how “do” caught on and then almost got driven out again

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Transcript Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘If I were an irrealis episode’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about how languages express unreality. But first, thank you to everyone who celebrated our anniversary month with us.

Lauren: We always enjoy seeing what you recommend to people and thanking you for doing that. If you did that not on social media, in your own private media channels, thank you very much. You can share Lingthusiasm with anyone who needs more linguistics in their life throughout the year.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode is a conversation about swearing in science fiction and fantasy with Ada Palmer and Jo Walton.

Lauren: I was so excited to hear you talk to two of our favourite authors. We’ve talked about Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning and the Terra Ignota series before. We’ve talked about Jo Walton’s Thessaly books. Getting to hear you talk to them about swearing in fantasy and in science fiction was a whole lot of fun.

Gretchen: This was so much fun. We also have several other bonus episodes about swearing more generally as well as a massive archive of bonus episodes if you’re looking for something to do, and you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes, or you just wanna help us keep making the show. Those are there. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to our full archive of bonus episodes for yourself, or they make a great last-minute gift idea.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, what is real?

Gretchen: That’s a big philosophical question, Lauren, “What does it mean for something to be real?”

Lauren: Mm-hmm. But we could also answer it linguistically.

Gretchen: We could, indeed. Languages have lots of ways of talking about things that aren’t real. Sometimes, this itself can get tricky. If you want to start a fun discussion among your friends at the dinner table, try asking them things like, “Is a toy sword a real sword?”

Lauren: Hmm, I can totally see a context where you’re playing with toy swords – or maybe those big foam swords that people use in live-action role playing. In that context, it’s a real sword. You’re like, “Please don’t hit me with your sword,” or “I’m gonna practice my sword work.”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 87: If I were an irrealis episode

Language lets us talk about things that aren’t, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that’s an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it’s a hypothetical situation (such as “if it rains, we’ll cancel the picnic” - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they’re called the irrealis.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples under the irrealis umbrella. We talk about various things that we can mean by “reality”, such as how existing fictional concepts, like goblins playing Macbeth, differ from newly-constructed fictions, like our new creature the Frenumblinger. We also talk about hypothetical statements using “if” (including the delightfully-named “biscuit conditionals), and using the "if I were a rich man” (Fiddler on the Roof) to “if I was a rich girl” (Gwen Stefani) continuum to track the evolution of the English subjunctive. Finally, a few of our favourite additional types of irrealis categories: the hortative, used to urge or exhort (let’s go!), the optative, to express wishes and hopes (if only…), the dubitative, for when you doubt something, and the desiderative (I wish…).

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Thank you to everyone who shared Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! It was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. We hope you enjoyed the warm fuzzies!

In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we’ve ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about invented swear words like “frak” and “frell”, sweary lexical gaps (why don’t we swear with “toe jam!”), and interpreting the nuances of regional swear words like “bloody” in fiction.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes! You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

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